It’s no secret that AI is top of mind for every agency owner. In fact, a staggering 89% of digital agency owners expect AI to help them scale and acquire new clients. The question is no longer if your agency should leverage AI, but how. For freelancers and solo entrepreneurs, many AI-powered builders are a dream come true, but if you’re running a digital agency, your needs are fundamentally different. Standard AI tools can get you started, but a professional-grade platform is what helps you scale. Choosing the right AI builder isn't just a technical decision—it's a strategic one that directly impacts your agency's efficiency, profitability, and future growth.

Basic AI features every builder needs in 2025

Before we talk about agency-specific needs, let's establish the baseline. In 2025, any AI website builder worth its salt should be able to handle these core tasks automatically. Consider this your minimum-requirements checklist.

• Content generation: This is the most obvious one. Your builder should have a powerful AI assistant that can generate and refine text for any section of a site. It also needs to intelligently source images, offering both a high-quality stock library and the ability to generate unique AI images on the fly.
• Site structure & layout: You shouldn't be starting from a blank page. A good AI should be able to take a simple prompt (e.g., "a modern plumbing business in Austin") and generate a complete, logical sitemap and a variety of page layouts that make sense for that industry.
• Privacy and accessibility: An important, but underappreciated, aspect of any good website builder—even an AI-powered one, is legal compliance. The websites you create should respect privacy laws and user privacy preferences, and should be accessible to individuals with different abilities.
• Design elements: Beyond just structure, the AI should propose cohesive design systems. This includes creating and applying site-wide themes, suggesting complementary color palettes and font pairings, and generating pre-designed sections (like testimonials or contact forms) that match the overall brand identity.
• On-page SEO: SEO isn't an afterthought. The AI should automatically handle the fundamentals, like generating descriptive meta titles and descriptions, applying local business schema where appropriate, and writing relevant alt text for all images to improve accessibility and search rankings.
• Code & customization: AI should be a launchpad, not a locked box. It needs to generate clean HTML/CSS and JavaScript for custom animations or functionalities. Crucially, it must also provide easy ways to integrate with external systems and APIs, so you're never limited by the platform's native features.
• Secure & easy to maintain: There are plenty of AI-powered tools on the market that can generate code, and that code could certainly be a website—but would that website be secure? Would it be easy to maintain? A good AI bundles with human-friendly interfaces, like a drag-and-drop editor, and strict guardrails, to prevent disaster down the road.
• eCommerce essentials: For online stores, the AI should be able to instantly generate compelling and SEO-friendly product descriptions, saving you hours of tedious and repetitive writing.

Agencies need more than the basics

Having a builder that ticks all those boxes is great. It means you can build a high-quality website faster than ever before. But an agency isn't just a website factory. You're a service provider managing complex projects, diverse client personalities, and critical business operations.

This is where direct-to-consumer (D2C) builders fall short. They're designed for a single user building a single site. They don't have the infrastructure to support an agency's workflow. Can your builder manage 30 clients with different permission levels? Can it import content from a client's old, messy site automatically? Can it automate your monthly billing and performance reports? If the answer is no, you're not using an AI platform made for agencies.

You need a platform that helps you skip to the good part; building strong client relationships, delivering more strategic value, and growing your business.

Duda’s AI Stack: AI built for agencies

This is where a professional platform like Duda's AI stack shines. It’s designed from the ground up to solve agency-specific challenges, moving beyond simple generation to intelligent automation and management. Here’s how.

AI-powered client management

Juggling client communications, feedback, and permissions is often the most time-consuming part of any project. Duda's platform treats client management as a core feature, not an add-on.

• Instead of endless email chains, for example, you could ask Duda Copilot to give a client "comment-only" access to a draft site. Their feedback is collected directly on the page, tied to specific elements. You can use granular permissions to control their access to specific AI tools.
• You can manage clients from Duda's Copilot in the client dashboard, integrate with your CRM or do it conversationally using Duda's MCP server connected to your preferred AI assistant.

Seamless integration with professional workflows

Agencies don't work in a vacuum. You have established processes for client intake, content collection, and project execution. Duda's AI integrates directly into these workflows.

• Imagine sending a new client a personalized AI-powered content collection form. Once they fill it out, Duda's AI can take that information—or even the contents of an existing document—and generate a complete, on-brand draft site in minutes. This completely transforms the initial build process from a manual chore to an automated strategy session.

Automation of tedious tasks

The small, repetitive tasks are what kill an agency's profitability. Generating reports, sending invoices, and backing up sites are necessary evils that Duda’s AI helps eliminate.

• Josh, founder of the award-winning agency Fix8 Media, uses Duda's AI to fully optimize the on-page SEO for a 10-15 page site in under an hour, a task that used to take hours manually. This efficiency allows him to deliver more value, regardless of a client's budget. “If I can give my clients value, even if they don’t have the budget, I will. Duda’s AI tools make that possible,” says Josh. This is how top agencies go from managing 10 clients to 100.

Duda’s agency-focused AI checklist

Here’s a quick summary of the key capabilities that set a professional platform like Duda apart:

AI-powers client management

• Quickly create clients and update their details
• Collect and implement feedback directly on the site
• Control client access to content and AI tools with granular permissions

Supports professional workflows

• Collect content with personalized forms
• Import content directly from existing sites or other web properties
• Generate a site from a brief or content document
• Integrates with your AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT via MCP

Automates tedious tasks

• Generate reports on site performance
• Sync content from an external database
• Recurring billing and backups

Choosing an AI website builder for your agency is about looking past the flashy generative features. It's about finding a true partner in growth; a platform that automates the tedious, streamlines the complex, and frees you up to do the high-value work that only you can do.